when everything in brothers in arms comes together, it comes together perfectly - the firefights are crazy and intense, and it's a great feeling to have men screaming and dying on both sides, mortars flying all over, tanks making men scramble for cover

but the problem with bia is that everything rarely comes together - it mostly plays out like a trial and error puzzle game with fps elements... and its best, it's one of the best... but it's very, very rare that the game is at its best

from what i've seen, bia3 won't change anything - if i can kick doors down, go inside all buildings, jump over fences, push through bushes and just go almost anywhere, then bia3 would have me excited - but as it stands, it's an outdoor corridor shooter - and that just does not work with the find/fix/flank/finish combat mechanic

so while i want to love the game, i feel that an amazingly innovative game series has tripped over its own success, and refuses to continue moving the genre forward by relying on what originally made it great, but what originally made it great was also an inredibly flawed mechanic, it was just great because it was - at the time - original and new

moh:a on the other hand, well that's a game that has me genuinely excited - if the dev hype can be believed, and it probably can't - then moh:a is going to be great... random starting locations, zones of control and dynamic ai that advances and retreats through cover as frontlines change will make the game a blast - but the sad truth is that EA's inhouse development teams pretty much suck almost 100% of the time - and most of EA's own games are drowning in mediocrity, so i don't know - it's hard to get hot for a game that'll probably suck

both games could be utterly awesome, but i think bia3 will probably be more of the same with prettier pictures and a few bells and whistles, without actually addressing the fundamental flaws with the subgenre, while moh:a - well, it's a damn EA game, have to wait for a demo on that one 

all entries are including expansions where available - and while they are tbs/rts hybrids, i have no problem including total war games

1. dawn of war 

2. medieval: total war

3. starcraft

4. red alert 2

5. medieval 2: total war

6. company of heroes 

7. age of empires 2

8. Z

9. warhammer: dark omen

10. warcraft 3

even though the deus ex collection may come with 2 games, you're likely to throw one of them out, i won't tell you which - make a game out of it, see if you can guess!

so down to business - the question shouldn't be which should i get, the question should be which should i get first

you should definitely buy both - i'm personally not fond of deus ex, but i acknowledge it as an amazing game (i love system shock 2, i just don't like the setting and theme of dx), but bloodlines i consider the best rpg ever made

i'd say get bloodlines first, then get system shock 2 if you've never played it, then get deus ex

but do get all three for sure, they are some of the best games money can buy

-- on a side note, has a magazine or site run a feature on bloodlines recently? there seems to be a revived interest in the game around here? personally, i think it's great 

[QUOTE="Subacious"]i don't believe itdarkfox101

if online voting was an option (even if there are also other options) then the results are stilted, since the people without pcs could not vote, or would be much less inclined to vote with the other options available

surveys are never accurate even if there are a million people involved, because they are always given to a target audience, which twists results

that said, i think it's probably not far from the truth - i'd guess at least 50% of pc gamers have consoles... 

not ideal, but i'm moving house next saturday (finally!) and can maybe get something a bit nicer setup

Chronicals of Riddick also use the Doom Engine

Lonelynight

Starbreeze Engine
The Starbreeze Engine is the technology base being used for all projects at Starbreeze. It is a proprietary game-engine fully owned by Starbreeze AB that contains all technology needed to develop and run an advanced in-door or semi-indoor game. It has been under development for over 7 years and is currently supporting PC, PS2, Xbox and GameCube platforms, and is currently being extended onto next-generation platforms.

The Engine has been successfully used and expanded during the development on Enclave (PC, Xbox), Knights of the Temple (PC, PS2, Xbox and GameCube) and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC, Xbox).

Key features
Cutting-edge lighting, including real-time shadows from all lights, high quality shading with normal mapping. (Xbox / PC)
Light-mapping per light-source. A lighting model for PS2 and GameCube that is semi-compatible with the fully dynamic Xbox/PC lighting model.
In-house developed tool-set for level building, scripting, normal-map generation, material editing, texture compilation, animation set compilation, etc.
Powerful sound-system with Dolby Digital 5.1 support
High character detail with facial animation, lip-sync and behavior system
Advanced bone-animation system featuring skeleton LODs and layered animation playback directly from a compressed animation format.
Rag doll physics
Powerful visual scripting system for impressive event driven game-play
Action driven AI developed in close relation with animation
Streamlined build-process for efficient Q/A and short load times

---

to answer the thread question, i'd say half life 2 is the easiest fps i've ever played, it's like medium difficulty is easy and the rest scales up built on that 

Worms Armageddon.

 

All those countless unintentional "holy crap/wtf?" moments that occur due to unexpected actions/flukes during a round against others over the net.

Genexi2

exactly what i was going for! single player's not so hot for laughs, but play multiplayer - especially hotseat - and worms becomes utterly hilarious during the i-know-how-to-play-the-game-but-i-suck stage... accidently dynamiting your own worms, accidently causing huge explosive barrel chain reactions that take out half your wormish army, firing rockets into the wind and having them fly right back, getting stuck while roping and releasing it only to go flying hundreds of feet into the sea... it's just constant laughs

after a few dozen hours, everything becomes mechanical as skill levels rise too high, everything ends up being about instant kills and it stops being funny

but then you just start changing rules and mixing things up, and it gets funny again!!!!

i think when it comes to entertainment - of all sorts - only monty python's flying circus and i'm alan partridge (uk tv comedy at its finest) has made me laugh harder than worms armageddon - which is remarkably high praise, i'd say

the top three most common guesses right now are:

1. shogun 2

2. something napoleonic

3. american civil war

we can all only speculate - but i'm really expecting shogun 2, a completely new engine and some genuine advancements that will really make it more than just a prettier version of shogun 1 - total war games to date have been revolution then evolution then revolution, if medieval 2 was an evolution on rome and rome was a revolution on medieval 1 - then whatever comes next should be quite special indeed, no matter what the setting

personally, though, i'd like CA to make a fantasy total war game based on steven erikson's malazan book of the fallen series - it would be a great change of pace, and malaz fits the total war feel perfectly

but from what i've seen, there is utterly no info on what's up next - and probably you shouldn't expect any announcement until some time after kingdoms is on the shelves... companies don't like deflecting attention away from present products with information about future products - maybe around spring next year we might hear something